Chapter 27
Calvin
The buzzing of my phone wakes me up. I blink my eyes open and grab it to see that the time is right after five in the morning. Way too early.
I look at the caller ID to see it’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. Oh shit. The only thing I can think of is that it’s my mother. She probably got hurt or something.
I ease out of bed, careful not to wake Seth. He rolls over, and I pad out of my bedroom before shutting the door behind me.
“Hello?” I whisper and head down to my kitchen to make some coffee.
“Is this Calvin Abernathy?”
“It is. What’s happened?”
“This is Dr. Dwayne Summers. We have you listed as an emergency contact and next of kin. Your mother came into the hospital by ambulance. She’d dialed 9-1-1 for blurred vision, vomiting, and a sudden and severe headache. By the time she got checked in, she passed. I’m very sorry.”
My legs give out from under me, and I slide to the kitchen floor. I lean against the cabinetry and scrunch my eyes closed. “She’s… dead?”
“Yes, I’m truly sorry,” he says again. “We tried everything to resuscitate her, but the damage was too great. The brain aneurysm ruptured. She had a hemorrhagic stroke. Most likely, it had been leaking blood on the brain for several days, resulting in a worse aneurysm, which explains why she died on the way to the hospital.”
I run a hand through my wrecked hair and rest my head against the cabinet. “Jesus.”
“We’ll have her in the morgue if you want to come by and view her. Then you can make funeral arrangements.”
“Thank you,” I say before hanging up on him.
I don’t know how I feel about this. I’d told Seth last night that I planned to talk to her about everything and maybe cut off contact, but fate had other plans.
Part of me is sad. The other part… doesn’t care.
It shows the level of love I feel for her, which is clearly not a lot.
Still, she’s the only family that I know, and now she’s gone.
I slam my fist on the floor so hard it hurts my hand. “Fuck!” I shake out my hand as it dawns on me why I’m so angry.
Closure.
I didn’t get any closure. My mother will never know how she made me feel growing up.
She’ll never know the hell she put me through.
She ruined me for relationships with a skewed sense of love.
Fuck, I wouldn’t put it past her to die intentionally to spite me.
Yes, it’s a ridiculous thought, but it intrudes into my mind anyway.
Whenever she upset me, I’d just fuck the hell out of Grant—before I knew he was cheating. After I dumped his ass, I would find other men to fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I became a damn whore to shut her the hell up, to get her out of my damn head.
Then Seth came along and changed everything. For the first time in years, I established a friendship without fucking him first. I had someone to lean on without demands and expectations. He gave me pure kindness and patience.
“Cal?” says a sleepy Seth, seeing me on the floor.
He squats in front of me with eyes full of concern, and I rush to gather him in my arms. I need to hold him. There aren’t any tears. I have nothing to give my mother, but I still need his presence and strength.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“My mother just died.”
Seth freezes, grabs my arms, and eases me back. “What?!”
“I got a call from the hospital in Houston. Aneurysm. A bad one.”
“Jesus, are you okay?”
“Yes… No. I… don’t know. I’m fucking conflicted.”
“It’s okay if you’re not upset, Cal.”
I let out a breath and relax my shoulders. He always makes me feel validated. “Part of me is stressed that I’m not feeling more than I am.”
He sits between my spread legs as his hands slide down my arms before grabbing my hands to hold. “I studied this stuff in college. Abuse comes in all forms. It’s completely natural not to feel strong grief for your abuser.”
“I never really considered her that way, you know?”
“Because of the love she gave you after her words ripped you to shreds. It’s a very common pattern of behavior with people like that. It doesn’t matter if it’s verbal, emotional, or physical abuse.”
I pull him against me again and hold him. He smells of sleep, lingering sex, and old cologne.
“Do you want me to go with you?” he asks. “To Houston?”
“You’re amazing, Tiger. Have I told you that?”
“I could stand to hear it more,” he teases gently.
“I see my personality is rubbing off on you. But seriously, no. Stay here with the kids. That’s too much. I’d rather deal with this alone. Damn, I hate to drag Braeden with me. One funeral was enough for him. Plus, he has school.”
“He can stay with the kids and me. It’s no problem.”
Is it too early to fall in love? Maybe. Probably. “Thanks, Seth. I’ll take you up on that.”
“Let me go with you!” Braeden demands, his eyes watering.
Crap. I thought he’d be happy to stay, but I can’t drag him to Houston with me.
“I can’t, kiddo. You have school, and you’ve already missed enough of it.
Seth has plans for you all. I won’t be gone long.
I only have to make funeral arrangements and hire a company to sort through all her stuff and clean out the house.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll have to go back for the funeral and put the home up for sale. ”
Honestly, there’s so much to do. Hell, it was only recently that Braeden got his money from the estate sale his lawyers set up. It’s all sitting prettily in his trust fund. He should have more than enough money for college and grad school, if he wants, and then some.
“Are you going to miss Halloween?”
“I’ll be here for that. Any ideas of what you want to be?” I ask to distract him.
He shrugs and picks at his nails. “I’m too old to dress up.”
“Then you don’t care if I miss it?”
“I-I didn’t say that.”
I rest a hand on his shoulder and gently grip it. “It’s okay if you want to trick-or-treat. Don’t stop being a kid yet. I know for a fact that teens still dress up. Hell, I plan to dress up.”
He looks up at me with those eyes that can see into your soul. I can also tell that he definitely wants to dress up. “Yeah?”
“Yep. Pick out a costume, and I’ll buy it for you.”
To my surprise, he hugs me. I smile and hug him back. Baby steps. In time, we’ll be a real family. “We’ve both lost our parents,” he says.
I hold him tighter. “That we did, kiddo. That we did. It hurts like hell, but more so for you."
It’s strange seeing your parents dead. They look the same, yet they don’t. She doesn’t look real.
I feel a flicker of grief as I stare at her face in the morgue, but there aren’t any tears.
I’m still fucking angry, though. It pisses me off that she’s managed to escape accountability.
Even if she never changed, at least I would’ve said my piece and broken free of her, and she denied me even that.
I nod to the attendant that I’m done, and leave for the home I grew up in.
This house was all I knew growing up. Leaving it was the best decision I ever made. Inside lingers a mixture of happiness and pain. It doesn’t take long for the anxiety to take hold of my throat. She’s gone, but my past will always be a part of me.
With my hands shoved in the pockets of my jeans, I stroll around the house, taking inventory of all that needs to be done.
Mom had done well for herself in real estate, so she made sure the inside was updated with the latest interior design and paint colors. She’d always been a neat freak, cleaning the house on her days off as if the Queen of England herself was about to stop by for a visit.
I dreaded those days she was off from work.
As soon as I’d walk in the door after school, she’d scream at me about her being the only one in the house who takes care of it, so I’d have to drop everything and clean with her.
It didn’t matter whether I had a ton of homework or finals.
Once I started high school and had football practice almost daily, it was easier.
The walls are covered with art, and the house is beautifully decorated, but she barely hung any pictures of me.
There may be a couple of framed ones from when I was a kid, but most of the photographs were shoved into binders or boxes.
That reminds me that I need to start taking pictures of Braeden and set them out, which will make him feel more at home. Hopefully.
There isn’t much I want to keep. Whomever I hire can sort through the crap and sell it all, for all I care. They can donate all her clothes and shit.
I head to the living room, which holds built-in bookcases.
I kneel, open the bottom cabinets, and pull out all the photo albums and photo boxes.
Those can come with me. I don’t want strangers handling those.
It grosses me out for some reason. I’ll also need to sort through her paperwork and legal documents.
There’s one album that has a familiar cloth cover in pale blue.
I open it to find my baby pictures. I was born in 1986, so the images are from an old camera.
Mom looked happy, at least when I was born.
I don’t know what happened to her or what caused her to be the way she was.
No one is born an asshole or a narcissist, at least not that I’m aware of.
As the years went on, the worse she got. The worse she got, the more I withdrew. I know deep down that I won’t miss her. Despite my anger, I’m also partially relieved that it’s over. That right there makes me feel like a fucking asshole.
I slam the book shut and stack the albums and boxes in a pile to take home later, then I head upstairs to my old bedroom. The space makes me anxious, too, but not as much as the rest of the house. My bedroom had been my safe space until Mom started intruding on it.
Nothing in here has changed all that much, except the bedding is different, newer. The furniture is the same, with the same arrangement as when I left for New Orleans. I stayed home during my college and grad school years. As much as I wanted a place of my own, home was free and close to school.
The room is empty of all my old belongings.
No doubt, Mom packed it all up or threw it out.
Who knows? I open the closet door to find plastic bins full of crap—my crap.
I drag out a bin, set it on the bed, and open it to find carefully wrapped model cars.
I used to love building them when I was young, dreaming of the day I’d have one of my own.
The first one I unwrap is a grass green replica of a 1970 Dodge Charger.
For a kid of ten, I wasn’t too bad at making them.
I wrap it back up, tuck it into the bin, and close the lid.
I’ll take that back with me, too. Maybe Braeden would like them.
If not, I can give them to Harrison and Sawyer.
Hell, perhaps the hellcat would like them.
In another bin is all my artwork. Jesus. It’s literally all of it, from kindergarten through high school. I used to love art, and I wasn’t too bad at it. Now I draw buildings, putting my love of art into a career.
In another box are trophies, ribbons, and pictures of my friends.
I grab a photo of my best friend, Greg, with Anna, who’d been his girlfriend at the time.
We lost touch when they moved away to California during our senior year.
God, I looked so young. It’s amazing how much one changes over two decades.
Mom kept everything of mine. She threw nothing away.
What does that mean? I think maybe she loved me in her own way.
She just sucked at showing it, or didn’t know how.
She had her good moments. It hadn’t all been bad, but I’d suffered enough that most of the good was forgotten or lost in memories somewhere in my brain.
Sitting in this house, all I can think about is the shit that I’ve gone through.
I’ll take my things back home after I return to Houston for the funeral. I flew here, so I can’t carry it back this trip. Nothing of hers holds any profound sentimentality, so I’ll get rid of it all.
My phone suddenly buzzes. I pull it out of my back pocket to see it’s Seth, my adorable preppy tiger. I smile at his thoughtfulness in checking up on me.
Tiger: How are you?
Me: Surprisingly okay. A little anxious, but that’s how I
always feel when I’m here.
Tiger: We can snuggle on the couch, drink white wine, and
talk about it when you get home.
Me: That sounds really nice.
And it does. I thought that part of me was lost after Grant, but I’m glad that he hadn’t destroyed all of me. Or maybe Seth found it in the trenches of my heart.
Me: How’s Brae?
Tiger: He’s… okay. A little stressed without you here. He
cares about you.
Me: I don’t know about that. I’m all he has.
Tiger: He cares.
Me: Thanks for that. I’ll see you soon, baby.